Impulse's CoDeveloper compiles ANSI C to Altera's Quartus Qsys

I just heard from the folks at Impulse Accelerated Technologies that they have announced the availability of Impulse C and CoDeveloper revision 3.7, which compiles C algorithms to Altera’s Quartus revision 12 Qsys software. This enables software developers to more easily compile C based algorithms for the fastest integration into Altera Stratix and Cyclone FPGAs.

Software developers increasingly use FPGAs to accelerate compute-bound microprocessor algorithms. But they frequently encounter three problems: #1 Most software developers are not familiar with VHDL, Verilog and hardware design in general; #2 most do not fully understand the nature of hardware resources on FPGA no less on an FPGA based development board; and #3 most cannot readily partition code between running on FPGA hardware and running, often over PCIe, on the host processor.

Impulse C 3.7 bridges these gaps by adding an interface between C algorithms and hardware resources that readily integrates within Qsys and Quartus. This lets a software developer refactor microprocessor oriented C into coarse-grained logic, that is easily machine-parallelized into multiple streaming processes. These processes run in FPGA hardware or are partitioned to run native on the host processor, or on available processor cores from Altera. The cross-compiled code remains fully ANSI C compatible so it can be simulated within standard tools such as MS Visual Studio. For cycle-accurate HDL verification, Impulse C also provides a direct export of a test bench to Mentor ModelSim or Aldec Active HDL.

Software developers work within a C development tool such as Visual Studio to offload the microprocessor code via parallelized optimization to FPGA.

Project managers report 50% time savings on first prototype and more than 80% time savings on iterations using the Impulse C tool to Quartus tool flow.

Interested designers can try C to Quartus/Qsys to FPGA free by requesting an evaluation from www.ImpulseC.com. Impulse also provides design services and free design consultations.

About Impulse Accelerated TechnologiesFounded 10 years ago, by members of Data I/O’s original ABEL team, Impulse has grown to be the most widely used C-to-FGPA toolset. Users include Honda, NASA, Toshiba, Hitachi and more than a few Wall Street banks. Impulse C also supports research at nearly 100 Universities worldwide.

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